Plenty of people have died in fighting tournaments, I even remember a few years back when a guy in the UK was killed in a Karate tournament. Not to mention the over 1000 documented deaths in boxing from between 1744 and the present. So to say that you are completely safe, and that there is no fear of being hurt, and no chance of getting the associated adrenaline rush when you step into the ring or the cage, makes absolutely no sense.

That seems to be the common wisdom at Bullshido (except for weapons training; I freely admit that if I am attacked by a kama-wielding thug and all I have at hand are my nunchaku, I'm screwed).

Knives, guns, and baseball bats are not far removed from hanbo, arrows and tantos. How can you not train in it?

Originally Posted by Petter

The general view appears to be that Bujinkan is rather low on resistive training in particular. See the many, many other threads around here for the prosecution's case (note the Search function!), then come back and present your evidence to the contrary.

You need to consider this first. Why does Karate exist at all? What is it that motivated them to create it.

I already told you what I think karate is: An old system of civilian self defence: Defending yourself against thugs and similar assailants, unarmed or armed simply and unarmoured, not a battlefield art. Now will you please tell me whether you maintain that it's a battlefield art or not?

If a tournament has just one rule "Do not seriously injure your opponent.". Define seriously injure. One person reading this will interpret it differently to you and thus have the advantage of those extra attacks/defences etc.

That's up to the person writing the rules of the tournament in question, isn't it?

In real combat people die. You can't measure the combat effectiveness of an art unless it is to the death.

So every time two people fight -- and it's not just for practice -- one of them dies?

Bullshit. There are bar fights and street fights and fights of all kinds all over the world all the time, and most people in "civilian" type fights survive, even if they are brutally beaten.

The distinct lack of bodies at the end [shows that UFC fighters pull their punches].

Where on Earth did you come up with this belief that people can't get hit hard without dying? Human bodies just aren't that fragile. Of course we may "measure", for instance, the ability to effectively hit people on the chin instead of the (more medically problematic) skill of effectively hitting people in the throat -- I would say there's plenty of transferable skill there.

Martial arts don't suck. Bujinkan doesnt suck. The relentless abuse of people who do Bujinkan is unjustified. No Martial Artist can criticise another martial art for not being "effective" because it is not provable.

So your assertion, then, is that all martial arts have exactly the same value for self defence? -- Since no martial artist has any right to criticise another. (Who decides on these "rights"?)

By the way, science -- the process of examining empirical evidence -- is not concerned with absolute proofs, which are the matter of mathematics and philosophy. Rather, scientists deal with approximations and models of problems all the time. Similarly, a sparring bout is a model of a real fight which, though not the real thing precisely, is still the best we can do without grievously injuring each other. (If you disagree, feel free to present your idea of a better model.)

But your assertion is that even if a martial art (such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Muay Thai) shows itself to be effective in the ring, and other arts (like Tai Chi, Bujinkan, and Ballet) completely fail to show any effectiveness in the ring, this has no correlation at all to their effectiveness in a real fight?

Some old japanese guy refusing to admit that he made a mistake calling himself a ninja because he will lose face is not a crime.

No, but it shows that he's not trustworthy -- not dedicated to the truth. If we can't trust his word on where his teachings came from, then why on Earth should we take his word for their effectiveness?

Neither is believing him.

Being wrong is not a crime in general. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

When someone comes to a forum like this looking for a martial art then the posts here should reflect the quality of the martial art and not religious persecution. No Martial Artist should look on here and be embarrased and humiliated to see their martial art being ridiculed for no apparent reason.

No apparent reason? Sweet mercy! Check out all the videos posted with ninjutsu practitioners around here (you have used the search function, right?) and tell me there's not even any apparent reason!

When someone comes to a forum like this looking for a martial art then the posts here should reflect the quality of the martial art and not religious persecution. No Martial Artist should look on here and be embarrased and humiliated to see their martial art being ridiculed for no apparent reason.

Bullshido is full-contact discussion, didn't you know? If you choose to participate here, you'd best be prepared to be offended, or at the very least present some evidence of any assertions you make if you want them to be taken seriously. For the record, being mocked or even insulted on an online forum where you voluntarily participate is not equivalent to religious persecution. The Jews have a couple of millennia of (documented) examples of real, live persecution, if you need some clarification.

I could cite examples where Karate, Iaijutsu, Bujinkan and Tae Kwon Do dojos actively encourage bullying. In fact, the black belt grading systems of some require bullying.

"Other arts have problems" does not help the case of Bujinkan. Either it's bullshit, or it isn't. For the record, the arts you mention are hardly the most respected arts in this area. Iaijutsu is hardly very relevant in modern societies, and karate and Tae Kwon Do are both infamous for being heavily littered with bullshit.

Knives, guns, and baseball bats are not far removed from hanbo, arrows and tantos. How can you not train in it?

Easily -- I've spent every day of my life so far not practicing with any of the above. I'm also not very concerned with arrows, because I don't feel the odds of my being ambushed by archers are high enough to be concerned with, or guns, because if someone points a gun at me I'm not dumb enough to try to attack him. Knife defence -- well, it'd be interesting to learn some, but I'm inclined to agree with my instructor who, when showing us a few basic knife defence moves, suggested that if someone comes at you with a knife you're already screwed.

I present myself and my own experience [as evidence that Bujinkan does commonly use resistive training].

Excellent! If you back this up with specifics -- what dojos you have practiced at, what kind of drills or types of sparring you did with resistance, and some form of evidence that this is indeed common (remember, no one ever said that no Bujinkan people train with resistance, only that most don't), we'll be on our way.

Two weeks ago, I was forced to defend myself. I'll spare the seedy details, but I snapped the guy's arm with a standard sport bjj armbar from guard.

It felt fucking disgusting and still gives me the willies. Austin's a small town, and I found out later that i've put him semi permanently out of work. He lives in a van and can't afford medical care. I've basically ruined this guy's life and feel fucking awful about it.

My point here is that if you'd ever actually been in a position where you had to seriously hurt somebody, you wouldn't be attracted to all this spooky hyperbole about body counts and injuries. You certainly wouldn't base your justification for training a terrible martial art on it.

"The only important elements in any society
are the artistic and the criminal,
because they alone, by questioning the society's values,
can force it to change."-Samuel R. Delany

RENDERING GELATINOUS WINDMILL OF DICKS

THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST NON-EUCLIDIAN SPLATTERJOUST EVER

It seems that the only people who support anarchy are faggots, who want their pathetic immoral lifestyle accepted by the mainstream society. It wont be so they try to create their own.-Oldman34, friend to all children

A couple of points - I don't recall Hatsumi ever saying he was a ninja - he does claim to teach ninjutsu, but I am pretty sure he said Takamatsu was the last ninja. I always thought the real controversy was about the veracity and aquisition of the densho?

Hedgehogy - sorry that happened to you man (and him), I really wish you hadn't ended up in that spot at that time.

Petter's doing an excellent job here, but I want to cover a couple of points.

Originally Posted by GBLS

If they dropped their weapon in battle then they did.

Karate's origins are a bit murky, but I've never heard a shred of evidence suggesting it was a battlefield system. Its first widespread exposure was via Funakoshi, whose first dojo was built in 1936. Before that it was supposedly an art of Okinawan royalty and their retainers - a bodyguard art, not a battlefield one. Given almost every other battlefield art out there, from the jujitsu ryuha to the unarmed combat surviving in Fiore and other Western medieval fighting texts, is a grappling system, this seems to make sense.

In Martial arts tournaments all combatants must pull their punches to avoid killing the opponent - even in UFC.

This says you know approximately squat about anatomy. Most people can't even muster knock-out power, let alone a killing blow, and pretty much every instance I've read of where someone has died from a punch (you usually read of this with untrained thugs taking on retired boxers, not kung fu masters or ninjas) has been because they've fallen, hit their head on hard ground or the street curb and broken their skull.

Don't you think that if it were so easy to kill someone, the much less challenging task of knocking someone out would become so trivial that boxing matches would end in the first few seconds and grapplers would never have got anywhere in the UFC through being knocked out on the approach?

Humans are rather less fragile than you'd think.

Originally Posted by GBLS

In Martial Arts contests you are not fighting for your life. You are not in fear. There is no adrenaline.

Bollocks to this. This just says you've never been in a full-contact tournament. Believe me, if you're competing against someone who you know is skilled, and it's going to end in one of you possibly being slammed, knocked unconscious, choked unconscious or having a limb mangled... your adrenaline comes on pretty goddamn fast.

You seem awfully ill-informed to be debating the lines you're taking. I'd urge you either to marshal your thoughts and come back with new, better researched arguments or to just let it drop.